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March 30, 2012 - Rush Limbaugh Program
37:20
March 30, 2012, Friday, Hour #1
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Live from the Southern Command in Sunny South Florida.
It's Open Line Friday!
Yay!
Thank you.
Thank you.
And Michelle, my Belle Obama and the kids are in Vegas on a vacation.
Not exactly a family-oriented place in my mind, but to each his own.
But that's the place Obama told everybody not to go anymore.
Remember that?
In his first month in office.
He said the days of getting on your private plane going to Vegas are over.
I guess they're back.
Hiya, folks.
It's Friday.
How are you?
And we are happy to be with you, wrapping up big week of broadcast excellence.
With an ever expanding audience geometric proportions here.
A thrill and a delight to be with you.
Here's the telephone number, 800 282 2882.
Now, for those of you new to the program asking what is open line Friday, it's very simple.
Monday through Thursday, callers must talk about things I am interested in.
That may sound a little dictatorial, and it is.
I am a benevolent dictator.
If I talk about things that bore me, the audience will be bored.
On Friday, I throw all those rules out, and whatever anybody wants to talk about is fine.
Even if it bores me, I'll fake it or act bored or what have you.
But it's my way of taking a courageous career risk, turning over the content portion of the program to lovable rank amateurs, as opposed to me, highly trained broadcast specialist.
So whatever you want to talk about for the most part, uh we don't complain about the electric bill or sewage problems uh in Oshkosh, things like that, but whatever you think maybe needs to be discussed that hasn't been, or if you have a question or comment about anything, this is the day for it.
800 282-2882, the email address L Rushpo at EIBNet.com.
No, I I have not had any secret meetings with either Newt or Romney.
Well, what no, no, no, just I did have a secret meeting with Romney back in January.
And I have since mentioned that, but I've I've not had a secret meeting like Newt had a secret meeting with Rom, but what I'm told is what's floating around out there, and there's no basis for this, it's just rumor status is that Newt would love to be Secretary of State if Romney is elected.
That's just floating around.
But I I have not been consulted uh by by Romney as to what position I want.
I've not had this meeting.
I um maybe after the election, I'll have a little bit more flexibility, and I'll be able to tell Romney then what I really want after the election, like Obama was gonna do with Vladimir Putin.
At any rate, have you seen this jackpot?
This this lottery jackpot, I'm gonna put this in perspective for you.
The Lotto jackpot is five hundred, what is it, five hundred and forty million dollars or something like that?
5540 million dollars.
Now the biggest jackpot in the world history of lotteries.
In fact, to give you an idea of how gigantic it Is it would only take 32,000 of these lottery jackpots to pay off the current U.S. national debt.
And I arrive at that 16 trillion divided by 500 million is 32,000.
That sounds low to me.
32,000 of these jack when when a hundred billion is a hundred thousand million, that sounds low to me.
I mean, a hundred thousand million is a hundred.
That can't be right.
Let me put it in perspective in a different way.
The taxes on this 540 million dollars are spent every 15 minutes in this country.
That's the way to put this in perspective.
And the 540 million, whatever the gross figure is that's around that 500, 540 million dollars.
The gross amount there is spent every hour.
Every hour.
And it just it's it's an interesting way of looking at the perspective.
I have a couple corrections I have to make.
We had a caller yesterday call about uh Greg Sargent, who uh has a blog at the Washington Post called the Plum Line, and I thought that Greg Sargent used to work at editor and publisher.
I was wrong, and he sent me a note saying he didn't work there.
So I was confusing it with a guy named Greg Mitchell.
And he also uh sergeant also says, I never predicted that the mandate would be upheld.
Okay, so I said that he did, and I have now made those corrections.
We do those corrections up front here.
We don't bury them, the EIB network.
Okay, let's um talk about the Supreme Court.
I am fascinated to watch the media here, folks.
What is happening today at the United States Supreme Court is what has happened for 222 years.
There's nothing special about today.
There's nothing unique.
The court is doing nothing today that it hasn't done since its inception.
But if you read the media, you would think that the vote the court's taking today is unprecedented.
Also, various stories.
Media obviously begging for a leak on the vote.
There hasn't ever been one that anybody can recall.
Even Roe vs.
Wade didn't leak.
And that decision wasn't announced for months after it was reached.
But the media, like here's the story.
This is the Associated Press.
Justices meet Friday to vote on health care case.
While the rest of us have to wait until June, the justices of the Supreme Court will know the likely outcome of the historic health care case by the time they go home this week.
Well, of course they're voting on it.
What what?
What is it?
Unfair that the justices know.
And it's not fair that we don't know.
While the rest of us have to wait until June, the justices will know the likely out.
Well, of course, duh.
They are the likely outcome.
After months of anticipation, thousands of pages of briefs and more than six hours of arguments, the justices will vote on the fate of Obama's health care overhaul in under an hour this morning.
They will meet in a wood-paneled conference room on a court's main floor, and no one else will be present.
You know, it is.
It is hilarious and it's pathetic how how the media are all aflutter about how the court is going to vote on Obamacare today and then not announce their ruling till the end of June.
It's not fair.
It just isn't right.
They know.
And we don't.
We have to wait till June.
So they're hunting around here, they're hoping and praying for leaks.
If you don't ought to read between the lines of these uh liberal media news stories as I do, you can see that that's what they're I mean, they're mining for leaks here.
They're asking clerks to let them know how it turns out.
Here's what's going on today.
This is the procedure, as it has been for 222 days.
Uh Years.
The nine justices will gather in this room and they will vote.
And it's only them.
There is nobody else in the room.
No clerks, there are no secretaries.
The most junior justice, who is Elena Kagan, takes the notes of the meeting.
She is the note taker.
She records what happens here.
There's no secretaries, no executive assistants.
There's no iPhone in there with Siri.
There are no clerks.
If somebody wants a cup of coffee, Elena Kagan goes and gets it.
That's common too.
The most junior justice does the grunt work like that.
It's tradition and it's always happened.
They will vote.
Opinions will be assigned.
There might be a little discussion going around the room as the justices explain things that are important to them, noteworthy, but there's very little persuasion, if any, that goes on here.
It remains entirely civil and collegial.
Do not erupt in arguments.
The arguments and the dissents and the disagreements occur in writing.
The vote that is held today is not final because after the opinions have been assigned and written, it's not likely, but it has happened.
In fact, it happened with Justice Kennedy in a fairly recent case, changed his original vote after reading opinions from the other justices.
That could happen here.
So the vote today is subject to change.
And the intricacy, the really fascinating thing about what's going on today is the vote itself and what happens as a result of it.
And there is a theory that is floating around out there that I want to share with him.
I'm going to take the break here, and I'm going to share with you this theory.
And as a little bit of a tease, I'll tell you this about it.
The theory is how the vote gets to 6-3 for total constitutionality.
That's the theory.
How they get there is what's fascinating.
And I'll tell you about that when we get back.
Okay, here we go.
We're back.
It's open line Friday, Rush Limbaugh, and not saying this is going to happen, by the way.
The fact that it's so widely being predicted now may if it's begin, if it becomes conventional wisdom, it could very well be like most conventional wisdom, and that is wrong.
But a lot of people, and one of the places, there's a there's a very, very left-wing uh uh blog called the uh uh SCOTUS blog, and the guy there is predicting 6-3 for the whole thing being found constitutional.
6-3, and a lot of others have looked at his reasoning.
Yeah, you know what?
I like that reason.
It makes perfect sense to me.
I think I'll sign on to that.
It means if it happens, and if it happens the way the theory explains it, we don't have a court looking at the law anymore.
We have a fully politicized third branch of government.
Now, I know that the liberal judges don't look at the law, they look at ways to rewrite it.
I I know that the left has politicized uh the courts for years, books have been written about it.
That's I'm not trying to send naive here.
I'm talking about the entire institution if it goes this way.
The only way you can get to six three, well, not the only way, but this theory's way requires that the judges look at things that they consider more important in the law, such as the reputation of the court, such as uh desire for there not to be so many five-four decisions, particularly on matters of such great importance.
So here goes.
The Chief Justice, John Roberts, gets to decide who should write the opinion when he is in the majority.
He assigns it.
This theory holds that he'll write it himself.
But before we get there, review where we are, Anthony Kennedy made it clear for all this talk about a plane wreck and a train wreck, if you read the transcripts all the way through, and we played the sound bites of Kennedy on both sides of this.
Anthony Kennedy was open, made it very clear, he was open to the idea that the mandate is constitutional.
If remember his phrase, you have a heavy burden to prove here.
If the government in his mind has made the case that this law is necessary and proper, he's he's indicated he could find the whole thing constitutional.
And he also appears open to the idea that this whole the whole business that Commerce Clause says you can't force people to buy something.
The way that got dissected and uh explained in a way to make people think, well, wait a minute, here maybe we could say that it's constitutional to require everybody to buy health insurance, because the fact is that uh their market already exists.
People are already buying health insurance.
It's not a new market the government's creating.
That, if it were a new market they were creating, that would be a slam dunk, no way is that constitutional.
But the out is the market's already there.
The government's not creating anything.
So the point of these two bits of analysis is to suggest that Roberts and Kennedy could be with the four liberals in finding the whole thing constitutional.
The idea that this legislation is so important, so transformative, that a 5-4 decision is not desirable by the chief and by a lot of people, that it would royal the country.
A 5-4 decision is too narrow if they're going to find the bill unconstitutional.
Because you see, theoretically, the Supreme Court hates, theoretically, hates telling Congress that what it's doing is illegal.
They hate intruding on it.
They always are balanced on the side that whatever happens in Congress is fine and dandy, and it has to be a real breach before they move in and take it away from them.
And if they're going to move in and take it away from them and declare what Congress did illegal against the law unconstitutional, they don't want to do that with a 5-4 decision.
Now, this that's what this theory holds.
I'm not telling you I subscribe to this.
But if that part of the theory is accurate, what's that tell us?
It tells us that the court's worried about its reputation more than getting the law right.
It's worried more about what people are going to think of them.
They're worried more about how it might royal the population.
5-4.
We need 6-3, and we need 7-2 on this.
So how do you get there?
The theory is that Kennedy will go ahead and join the libs and make it 5-4 for total constitutionality because he signaled that.
Then Roberts, after having seen that, knows he can't stop it, so he joins the majority to make it 6-3 so that he gets to write the opinion.
And in writing the opinion, Roberts will then limit the scope of the Obamacare bill to something like, yes, Congress can force us to buy health insurance, but nothing else.
Now you might be asking us, well, can the court do that?
There's nothing in this legislation about limiting it to just health insurance.
Court does it all the time, folks.
Try to find a limiting principle in here.
When there's not one in the bill, this is what frustrates me about this whole theory.
There is no limiting principle in the bill.
And yet, this theory holds that they want a 6-3 or 7-2 decision, that Kennedy's gonna go with the libs, that Roberts will see that, and to protect the court's reputation and to write the opinion and have a limiting principle in there to limit the damage of this.
The theory is that Roberts can go either way, and once he sees how it's going to go, then he'll join the majority and then write the opinion himself to limit the damage, if you will.
This theory also requires that you believe Roberts signaled during oral arguments that he could find a way to find this whole thing constitutional, that he didn't seem anywhere near as opposed to this as Scalia was, for example.
So if he crosses over with Kennedy and joins the Libs, and it's six to three, he writes the majority opinion, and he makes it as narrow as possible.
So that, yeah, they can force us to buy health insurance, but they can't make us buy anything else.
That won't hold up, by the way.
That won't no limiting principle like this is ever.
No, nobody's gonna remember there's a limiting principle in this.
They're gonna remember if this happens, it was six to three or seven to two for total constitutionality, and that's it.
But that's how this theory goes.
As I tell you, this requires you believe the court cares not about the law, but rather about other things.
Open line Friday, Rush Limbaugh having more fun than a human being should be allowed to have.
Now, the theory that I just gave you comes from Scotus blog.
It's run by a very left-leaning guy.
A lot of people who are not liberals have run across this theory and it appeals to them.
And it's slowly but surely uh behind the scenes becoming conventional wisdom.
And of course, the left is glomming onto this because they love this puzzle.
They would that they're fantasizing here almost.
I mean, they dreaming of a six to three decision where the chief is in the majority and writes the opinion.
They can't have a better day than that, other than if it went seven to two.
And it could go seven to what we're what this theory relies on is justices care, particularly the chief, doing two things, caring more about what is thought of the court at the end of this in terms of its reputation.
The theory relies on the justices being very upset with all of these recent five-four decisions, that that's too narrow, and that we have something this momentous, and it is.
This will forever, as I forget which justice said it.
This forever changes the relationship between citizen and government.
This is it.
I mean, this changes the whole notion of the Constitution.
Limits government.
This wipes that out.
What troubles me about the theory is that that's not even that has to be totally discarded.
The law, the constitution has to be totally discarded, all because the court is going to be worried about a margin of defeat.
Like if Kennedy goes the other way, 5-4, the same theory holds that Roberts will then join that side to make it 6-3 unconstitutional.
So it still is about Kennedy here.
In this theory, and that's all this is.
Just a theory.
But what made me want to explain it to you is that it's out there and that a lot of people on the right find it appealing.
Those people, too, who find it appealing, are frustrating to me because they are looking at this, like I said earlier this week.
This is just another fun intellectual exercise to them.
We're here in a classroom and we're debating political science.
And we are trying to be the smartest people in the room to figure out exactly what the court's gonna do within our own political constraints.
And that's what frustrates me about the fact that most people talking about this don't get the severity of what we face is because in the real world there's no way this law is constitutional.
And I don't say that as a partisan.
In a just and sane objective world, this would be slam dunk, struck down nine to nothing.
It should at least be seven to two unconstitutional and throw the whole thing out.
But the theory that seems to be the popular one relies on nothing having to do with the law.
Nothing.
It has to do with positioning, court reputation, uh not causing riots in the streets at the end of the day when the decision is announced, this this kind of thing.
Let's go to the audio sound bites.
Because they're quite illustrative.
Nina Totenberg, who is the Supreme Court reporter for national public radio, and she's another one of them, all the smart people, all of the big kids in the clique.
All of the supereducated members of this clique, and they never talked to anybody outside it.
Like Chris Matthews on his show list actually said that the idea that this thing may be unconstitutional never occurred to him.
Never occurred, meaning he never once for a fleeting moment considered that it was unconstitutional.
Pelosi the same way.
She was asked some months ago about constitutionality.
She was generally, genuinely stumped.
She looked at the reports, Cocked her head.
Are you serious?
In their minds, it's constitutional because it's their idea.
And because they think it's filled with compassion.
Justice Kagan.
We haven't played this soundbite, and I don't know that we've had it, and I'm not looking for it, Cookie.
Don't I can handle it here.
Elena Kagan said during oral argument, what is the big deal here?
We're not doing all we're doing is throwing a boatload of money at the states and saying, here, use it for health care for poor people.
This is a justice on the Supreme Court, and that's what she thinks is in the 2700 pages.
And she wrote the administration's defense of this for the solicitor general.
She used to be the solicitor general.
She has no business even hearing this case, by the way.
She should have recused.
But she summed up in a couple or three lines, the entire leftist view of this.
What's wrong with it?
All we're doing is throwing a boatload of money at the states and saying, here, go ahead and give health care to poor people.
That's what she thinks this bill is.
That's what Matthews thinks it is.
That's what Nina Totenberg thinks it is.
That's what Jeffrey Tubin thought it was.
The idea that that's unconstitutional, that the federal government can't throw and boatloads of money was her phrase.
From the bench in America's courtroom, Justice Kagan, throw boatloads of money at the states.
What's the problem here?
That's what Jeff Tubin thought.
That's what they these are the smartest people in the world, folks.
I'm trying to tell you they aren't.
They're not even curious.
They are living in a prison of their own conceit and of their own arrogance.
Pelosi just said yesterday about Obamacare.
We wrote a bill that honored the Constitution.
We wrote a bill that is constitutional.
How does she know?
She never read it.
You realize how few people who are deciding the fate of this bill will have read it.
The point I made yesterday.
Nobody, not one justice has read 2,700 pages.
Most of the people who voted for it have not read it.
Now, we have people who have on the right.
We've read it.
That's why we know what's in it.
Pelosi doesn't know what Elena Kagan doesn't know what's in it.
And she was at the Solicitor General's office for Obama before Varilli, working on the defense of this case, both at the appellate level and at the Supreme Court.
And Chris Matthews, I don't thought that it's unconstitutional never occurred to me.
It's like Juan Williams, who heard Lord Moncton from the U.K. present the case against man-made global warming.
Juan Williams, you know, I never knew this existed.
I didn't know anybody disagreed with it.
Didn't know.
Here's a guy working at Fox News who didn't know that there are people who disagree with the notion of man-made global warming.
We were led to believe here that Nina Totenberg, who you're here at a second here, Chris Matthews, don't even know that there are people who oppose it because it's not constitutional.
They were genuinely rocked off their core this week.
This was no act.
Jeffrey Tubin, Plainwreck, Train Wreck, this was no sleight of hand.
They, for the first time in their exalted existence, heard principled opposition to the constitutionality of this bill, which to them is no more than boatloads of money to the state so they can give health care to the poor.
I get you could call them provincial.
Then nobody New Yorkers are highly provincial.
One thing I learned when I moved there in 1988, New York is in largest market, biggest market, biggest city, the focus of everything, the center of everything.
But even the New York Post, any newspaper in New York, the Oshkosh, oh Marsha Clark.
This is a great example.
Marcia Clark who tried the OJ case, she spent five minutes in Long Island one day.
That was the focal point of the story in the New York papers.
She was a New Yorker trying the OJ.
That's how provincial they are.
And liberals are the same way.
They're just provincial.
Their world is it.
There is nothing else.
And they're not even curious about what else there is.
Yeah, you and I, we see this, and we can't believe it.
Because not only can we explain what we believe, we can explain what they believe.
We know what animates them, we know what they believe, and that's why we can skunk them in any issue or idea argument that comes down the pike.
They have no clue.
They are just as insulated as somebody in prison.
Here's let's get this at Totenberg here.
This morning on MSNBC's Daily Run down, uh run down, and this is F. Chuck Todd's show.
He's the NBC political director.
He says a lot of panic at the White House, to be frank.
They really thought this wasn't going to be that hard of a case.
They knew that there was a lot of politics around it, but they really thought, looking at it, they get as many as seven votes in their favor.
And now they're biting their fingernails.
Should they be biting their fingernails, Nina?
They should be biting their fingernails.
The White House was right not to worry about it way back when.
Very minority other than the community.
Everybody, including conservatives, thought, oh, this case is a piece of cake.
So all the so-called smart people, the entire legal community, other than the hardcore types, which is 70% of the American people, by the way.
The people she's talking of the hardcore right way, that's 70% of the American people.
Nina Totenberg and her group are the ones In the very small minority.
Oh, yeah.
Oh, everybody, including conservatives, thought this case is a piece of cake.
To the extent that conservatives thought it was a piece of cake, not legally, if there were any conservatives who thought this thing was a piece of cake constitutionally, is because of the faith in the legal system we've lost, not in the merits of the law.
And I should also add, there are a lot of conservative legal people, media people in Washington, New York, who want to impress people like Nina Totenberg.
So they run around, oh yeah, Obamacare, easy slam dunk.
See, I'm as open-minded and smart as you are.
Will you invite me to your next party?
Or whatever.
But these are the ones.
Nina's totally out of touch.
Peggy Noonan has a column today in which she sort of says, you know, this guy's not the guy I thought he was, meaning Obama.
Not the guy I thought he was.
Not so smooth operator.
And there's one line in her column here.
How did the constitutional law professor from the University of Chicago not notice that his centerpiece legislation was unconstitutional?
She's very curious.
Ask that question.
Why how does Obama not know?
Well, the answer is he doesn't care.
The answer is it's okay if it's unconstitutional.
He doesn't care.
The Constitution is an obstacle to him.
His surprise, if he is if he is indeed surprised, his surprise is that the opposition here has a chance.
I gotta take a break.
We'll come back.
There's much more, as you can tell, straight ahead.
The End How in the world could this be unconstitutional?
All we're doing is throwing a boatload of money at the states and saying, here, use it for health care for poor people.
That's Justice Elena Kagan in oral arguments, the U.S. Supreme Court telling us what's in the 2700 pages of Obamacare.
And here's more Nina Totenberg from uh MSNBC's Daily Rundown today with F. Chuck Todd.
So after Nina and F. Chuck agree that a very uh hardcore minority of legal community even thought this thing was unconstitutional.
F. Chuck says, well, the question that a lot of folks that are watching this wonder is how much politics is there on this court, Nina?
Is it more political on this court than previous courts?
Is it the same?
We just see it more?
Which is it, Nina?
It's much more ideologically divided because of the Bush appointments, which were very, very, very conservative.
The court has become so much more conservative.
The court has lost some credibility since Bush versus Gore.
It used to have the approval or the respect when you did polls of people in both parties.
And now, increasingly it's Republicans who respect the court and Democrats who are having great reservations about it.
And I'm not sure there's anything if the court is going to take us in a dramatically different direction, it's representative of what we see in the rest of the country, and you're going to see people split on it the way they are about everything else.
Damn those Republicans, damn those conservatives.
Everything was fine until they came along.
Everything was hunky-dory.
And then the conservatives came along and made it all hardcore and partisan.
You know, they're very conservative people on this court.
Ginsberg and Breyer and Kagan and Sotomayor, they're just normal standard down the road, middle of the road people, and nothing political about them.
Yeah, you got Scaline, you got Thomas, you got Robertson Alita, yeah, Bush ruined the court.
Now here's Nina.
Nina, I don't know if she intended to do this, but she let it out.
When she said here, if the court's gonna take us in a dramatically different direction, it's representative of what we see in the rest of the country, meaning liberalism is losing in her mind.
They're in trouble.
Obama's in trouble.
The polling data, this guy's not loved.
There is no messianic feel for Obama like there was in 2008.
They're very, very troubled by this.
Now don't worry too much about this theory, folks.
The theory is, as I say, becoming conventional wisdom, and that means it's irrelevant and is wrong.
And it's advanced by the left.
And by the way, uh here's a quote here from Senator Richard Blumenthal, former Attorney General of Connecticut, now Senator from Connecticut.
The left is playing this, you will ruin your reputation card.
That's what this theory is about.
The theory the justices will see it.
They're trying to intimidate the court into ruling in favor of Obamacare.
Blumenthal said, the court commands no armies.
It has no money.
It depends for its power on its credibility.
And the only reason people obey it is because it has that credibility.
And the court risks grave damage if it strikes down a statute of this magnitude and importance and stretches so dramatically and drastically to do it.
Also, you guys and the court, you you people, you are going to destroy the court and your credibility, and you're going to cause people won't obey if you don't do the right thing here and find this constitutional.
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